FIFA president Sepp Blatter said England’s failure to reach the European Championship highlights the need for European nations to look at the influx of foreign players in their leagues.

“It is time that this item shall now be tackled very seriously,” Blatter said yesterday in the run-up to tomorrow’s qualifying draw for the World Cup.

The large foreign influence has been cited as one of the causes of a shortage of homegrown talent in England, whose national team lost 3-2 to Croatia at Wembley on Wednesday to miss out on Euro 2008.

Blatter has vied to reintroduce limits on foreign players in national leagues, a move which amounts to a direct challenge to labor laws of the European Union, where most of the world’s leading leagues are.

By the 2010-11 league season, Blatter wants to have a system where a team’s starting lineup would have at least six national players and he will take the issue to the FIFA Congress in Sydney next May.

The percentage of foreign players in leagues has often been the first issue many fans and officials center on when their national team falls on hard times. Yet, teams like AC Milan and Inter Milan are also loaded with foreigners and it did not stop Italy from winning the World Cup last year.

Even Blatter said the high percentage of foreigners in the Premier League was not the key issue in England's Euro 2008 demise.

“Definitely not. The qualification was really on the spot,"” he said, highlighting the tight race with Russia which went through because of a 1-0 win over Andorra.

The issue of foreigners in the Premier League gained prominence when Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard said quotas needed to be imposed to bring the national team back to prominence.

Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who sometimes fields a team without any Englishmen, claims instead that foreigners have raised the level of play in England.